Jane and the Genius of the Place jam-4

by Stephanie Barron

  And watching him as he knelt over the body of Mrs. Grey, I felt a familiar chill at my heart. I had witnessed such scenes too many times before. For a moment, I might have joined Miss Sharpe, in averting my eyes; but another instant's reflection steeled my resolve. However unpleasant the evil might be, it should encompass all our family; and I could not refuse to help my brother, whom so many occasions had proved so generous to myself. Neddie's superior knowledge of the world, and easy passage among the Great, had used to comfort his shy little sisters; now, it was he who should enter a strange and bewildering land, and I who must walk along familiar paths.

  The varied experiences of the past several years have opened a new world entire to my understanding; I have endured and survived encounters with a most unscrupulous body of men, without loss of dignity or a very great diminution of reputation; and I could not but be aware now that Neddie's role in the present drama must afford me a greater knowledge of the particulars, than I had heretofore been able to command. It is not that I am prone to a morbid curiosity, or find enchantment and delight in the manifestation of evil, but rather that the power of laying plain a convoluted puzzle — to the greater good of some unfortunate, and the generalised comfort of Society — must have its very great satisfaction. I have not yet learned to despise my curiosity, for all my mother's anxious urging, or the perils of dubious association it brings inevitably in its train. It has been my privilege (tho' some would call it misfortune) to have the unravelling of a few very tiresome knots in the recent past; and in the present instance of Neddie's need, my talents might prove of use.

  “What are we to do, Jane?” Lizzy whispered, “for we should not prolong Fanny's exposure to such a dreadful scene. And yet Neddie—”

  “—must remain,” I agreed. “A Justice is required to think of others before his family.”

  “But, Mamma, how very odd she looks, to be sure!” Fanny stared fascinated at the spectacle near the coach, now virtually obscured by a crowd of the curious. Another instant, and she had mounted to her favourite perch on the box next to Pratt, with the object of gaining a better view.

  “Come down at once, Miss Fanny!” Anne Sharpe exclaimed, and took a decided grip on her charge's ankles.

  “Perhaps Miss Sharpe and Fanny might pay a visit to the stables,” I murmured to Lizzy. “It is not above five minutes' walk, and they could enquire after the Commodore. That should divert Fanny's interest.”

  Lizzy shook her head decisively. “An admirable notion, Jane, but for the murderer we have loose in the grounds!”

  “Murderer?” Fanny slid abruptly back into her seat. “But is Mrs. Grey murdered then, Mamma?”

  Lizzy gathered her eldest into her arms. “I fear that the lady is dead, my Fanny, but how she came to be so, I cannot say. I should not have spoken until Papa had come to us. Depend upon it, your father shall very soon apprehend the whole.”

  Fanny's eyes might widen at this speech, and her breath come short; but to her credit, the child evinced a tolerable composure. She neither shrieked, nor fell insensible, nor shuddered as with a dreadful presentiment (as might betray an enthusiast of horrid novels), but turned her soft blue eyes upon her governess and said, “Poor Sharpie. I know you have not the stomach for such things — you were taken quite ill when Caky killed a rat once in the nursery.[9] But then, it did squeal most horribly under the poker and tongs, and you are a little goose, are you not?” She patted Miss Sharpe's hand. “I cannot think that Mrs. Grey, however dead, was the sort to squeal. And do consider, Sharpie, that my father must presently relieve our fears.”

  Miss Sharpe kissed Fanny's flushed cheek, and very sensibly produced her chapbook, a serviceable volume in which she has been collecting riddles throughout the summer. The scheme was devised entirely for Fanny's amusement; and in a very litde while the two were lost in a familiar exchange, and the danger of hysterics was safely past.

  A cicada's trill burst wildly from the copse at the meeting-grounds' fringe — a sudden, sharp keening — and the heat, at the moment, was as oppressive as a lap robe.

  “Pray look after the child, Miss Sharpe,” Lizzy said abruptly. “Jane and I must speak to Mr. Austen.” And with a word to one of the liveried footmen, who had been staring impassively into the middle distance all this while, she was assisted out of the barouche. Immediately I followed.

  A knot of men, high-born and low, had gathered tightly around my brothers and the Collingforth chaise. With a tap of her parasol on a broad shoulder, Lizzy won her way to the centre, where Denys Collingforth was held firmly in the grip of two of his neighbours.

  “I tell you, I know nothing!” he spat out. “The jade would no more speak to me this morning than she'd look at a cur in the mud. Too fine for Denys Colling-forth, and not above saying it to the world. I never came near her, nor she near me!”

  “Then how do you explain, Mr. Collingforth, that she entered your chaise just prior to the final heat?” Lizzy broke in smoothly. “My sister and I observed it ourselves.”

  The gentleman's mouth fell open, and the colour drained from his face. “Impossible!” he cried. “I was absent from the blasted carriage the better part of the day! Everett will vouch for me — and an hundred others!”

  “Where is Mr. Everett?” Neddie cried, with a look of interest for his wife.

  The stranger dressed in black, who had supported Collingforth in his dispute with Mr. Bridges, shouldered his way through the crowd. “I am Joshua Everett.”

  “Are you acquainted with this man?”

  “I am. He is Denys Collingforth, of Prior's Farm.”

  “And did you bear him company at any time this morning?”

  “For the entirety of it, sir. We breakfasted at eight, drove out to the meeting-grounds and secured our place, and left a boy to look after the horses.”

  “That would have been at what hour?” Neddie pressed.

  Mr. Everett shrugged, and looked to Collingforth for corroboration. “Ten, perhaps?”

  “Half-past. You forget the tankard of ale we drank along the road.”

  “Half-past,” Neddie said, as tho' he possessed a mental ledger of Collingforth's doings. “And then, Mr. Everett?”

  “Then we walked about the grounds, gave a look to the horses, placed some bets with a few gentlemen among our acquaintance — and took up a position near the cocking ring.”

  “I saw them there,” a voice called from the crowd.

  “And I,” said another.

  Neddie nodded swiftly at my brother Henry, who went in search of Collingforth's acquaintance.

  “All that would have been prior to the heats themselves, Collingforth.”

  “Yes. I watched those at the rail.”

  “Your wife did not accompany you this morning?”

  “Mrs. Collingforth is indisposed. And with Everett up from Town—”

  “I see. And so you insist that there was no one within the chaise when this lady observed Mrs. Grey to enter it?”

  “I tell you, Austen, I never returned to the coach until the moment I pulled open this door!” The desperate man glanced with revulsion at Mrs. Grey's rigid countenance. She lay, partly covered with a borrowed shawl, a few feet from my brother, as tho' resting under his protection. “Can not you fetch a surgeon, and close the woman's eyes? How she stares at us all! 'Tis hardly decent!”

  “Is there a surgeon present?” Neddie called harshly over the ring of faces.

  Muttering, and a jostling to the rear; then a short, round-faced man with a bald pate appeared, bowing to left and right. “Tobias Wood,” he said, “at your service, Mr. Justice, sir.”

  “Very well, Mr. Wood. We shall require your assistance by and by, in removing the corpse to Canterbury. Perhaps for the present, it would suffice to close her eyes.”

  This Mr. Wood did, with a gentleness of purpose that must relieve the hearts of many.

  “Madam,” my brother said to his wife with punctilious courtesy, “you have said that you observed Mrs. Grey to enter
Mr. Collingforth's chaise just before the final heat. That would be—” He consulted his watch, and glanced at Henry.

  “—sometime before two o'clock,” Henry supplied. “I recollect the hour, because it was the Commodore's last race.”

  “I should put Mrs. Grey's approach to the carriage rather closer to half-past one,” Lizzy said clearly. “But you know it makes no odds, Neddie, because Mrs. Grey was certainly alive when the heat was run. We all saw her riding her black at the head of the pack, and afterwards she drove her phaeton out of the grounds. I merely raised the point because Mr. Collingforth seems to have forgot the earlier visit.”

  “I know nothing of any visit!” he shouted; and a vein in his neck pulsed dangerously. One of his captors lost his grip on the man, and Lizzy stepped backwards as the right arm swung free.

  “I perfectly apprehend your reasons for raising the point,” Neddie said politely to his wife, as tho' he presided over a ruling in a parlour game. “Did Mrs. Grey knock upon the chaise's door?”

  “She did. It opened immediately to admit her.”

  “So there was someone within?”

  “I must assume so. I did not glimpse the face.”

  “Miss Austen?” Neddie enquired formally of me.

  I shook my head in the negative.

  “Mr. Collingforth,” he continued, “what of the boy you engaged to stand watch over the carriage?”

  “Ran off to spend his coin, I must suppose. Such things have occurred before.”

  “Will the young man engaged by Mr. Collingforth come forward now and tell his story?” Neddie cried.

  This time, there was no movement to the rear of the crowd. Neddie repeated his words, to no avail; and Collingforth looked blackly at his friend Everett. The latter's countenance was as contemptuous as before.

  Neddie mopped his reddening brow with a square of lawn and turned once more to the unfortunate gentleman. “Can you offer any explanation for Mrs. Grey's visit to your carriage, Collingforth?”

  “I cannot. And as your good lady says, Mr. Justice, it makes no odds. The jade lived to win her race, and carry her plate from the field. How she came to end up here, and in such a state, I cannot say. But I suggest you enquire of the parson, Mr. Bridges, and his fine military friend. Ask them why they might have wanted the French trollop dead, and I'm sure you'll hear an earful.”

  Beside me, Lizzy's fingers clenched about the pearl handle of her parasol, and her green eyes drifted languidly over the assembled faces. Searching for her brother, perhaps, with the barest hint of anxiety.

  “You have a marked proclivity for abuse, Collingforth, that you would do well to suppress,” Neddie said warningly. “The lady is Mrs. Grey, whatever your opinion of her; and I would request that you show some respect of the dead.”

  Collingforth shot a look full of hatred at the corpse, and I shuddered to observe it. However Mrs. Grey had charmed the gentlemen of Kent, this one had not been among their number.

  “Did you invite her to the chaise, Collingforth, and fail to keep your appointment?”

  “I did nothing of the kind. I'm a respectable married man.”

  Someone in the crowd guffawed loudly, and Collingforth cast a bloodshot gaze over the assembled faces. “I'll demand satisfaction of the next man who offers disrespect.”

  “What about Mrs. Grey?” someone called. “You call what you did to her Respect? Where's her habit, Collingforth? You keep it to give to your wife?”

  “Silence!” Neddie shouted, in a tone I had never before heard him employ. “I require a fast horse and rider for Canterbury! There's a gold sovereign for the lad who makes the journey in under an hour!”

  “I'm your man,” cried a fellow in a nankeen coat; one of the stable boys, no doubt.

  “Ride like the wind to the constabulary,” Neddie instructed him, “and send back a party of men. We will require any number. Where is Mrs. Grey's groom or tyger?”

  “Mrs. Grey's tyger!” The cry went up, and was repeated through the swelling ranks; and after an interval, the boy with the bent back was rousted from the stable-yard, with the Greys' jockey in tow.

  The tyger stopped short at the sight of his mistress, and gave a strangled cry. Then he looked blindly about the ring of men, his fists clenched; saw Collingforth still pinioned; and rushed at him, flailing and pummelling. “Why'd you want to do it, you coward? Why'd you want to go and kill 'er for? She wanted none o' your kind! You couldn't leave 'er in peace!”

  Neddie grasped the boy's shoulders and pulled him away. “What is your name, boy?”

  “Tom,” he said. “Tom Jenkins.”

  “Why did your mistress leave you behind?”

  “She asked me to walk La Fleche back home. Crandall, 'ere, was to walk the filly.”

  Very white about the lips, the jockey touched his cap.

  “La Fleche?” Neddie enquired.

  “The black 'un, what she rode in the heat.”

  “I see. And what road did she intend to take?”

  “Why, the road to Wingham, o' course. The Larches lies just this side o' Wingham.”

  Neddie glanced around him. “Henry! Have you a fresh horse?”

  “Of course.” My brothers had gone mounted to the race grounds well before our party in the barouche, being eager to see the Commodore into his stall, and survey the course. We had joined them some hours later.

  “Then set out immediately along the Wingham road. Mrs. Grey's phaeton must be found, and secured from injury. Ten to one it has been stolen—” He stopped, perplexed. The unspoken question hovered in the air: How had Mrs. Grey come to lie in Collingforth's chaise, quite devoid of her scarlet habit, when we had all observed her to drive out of the grounds a half-hour before? And if she had met with mishap along the road, and her phaeton been stolen — why was her body not lying beneath a hedgerow?

  “I shall send a constable towards Wingham immediately I have one,” Neddie continued, “but until he arrives, Henry, I beg of you, do not stir from The Larches. If you happen upon the phaeton by some lucky chance, remain with it until the constable appears. Now, Tom!”

  “Yes, sir?” The tyger dashed away his tears and endeavoured to stand the straighten

  “Is the black horse in any state for ajog?”

  “As fresh as tho' he never was out, sir.”

  “Very well. You and your colleague — Crandall, is it? — shall bear Mr. Austen company along the Wingham road. If the phaeton is discovered, leave Mr. Austen in custody and proceed to The Larches. Inform the household of what has befallen your mistress. Is that clear?”

  “As glass, sir.”

  “Your master is from home, I presume?”

  “He's in London, like always.”

  “Then a messenger must be sent to him with the news. The housekeeper will look to it.”

  “Like as not she'll send me,” the jockey volunteered. “I usually knows where the master can be found.”

  Tom glanced at his murdered mistress, who lay so still amidst the dust and the singing cicadas. “What about milady?”

  “We shall convey her to Canterbury,” Neddie answered gently, and clapped the boy's shoulder. “She must lie for a while at the Hound and Tooth, for there will be an inquest.”

  “Inquest? But that rogue as did for 'er is standing 'ere, large as life!” the boy spat out, and his fists clenched again. “If I'd been with 'er, as I shoulda been, you wouldn't be looking so easy, Mr. Collingforth, sir!”

  “Hold your tongue, Tom,” Neddie said sharply. “This is not the time or place for harsh words. The coroner will determine Mr. Collingforth's guilt. You must tell the housekeeper where Mrs. Grey lies — the Hound and Tooth, in Canterbury.”

  “I'll tell 'em everything,” he replied, his face crumpling once more. “They'll want to come and see to 'er.”

  “I'm afraid that will have to wait until after the coroner has examined the corpse. Now off with you both to the stables!” Neddie's voice was stern — a palpable support, at such a time. “
You have a duty that cannot wait.”

  “Aye, sir.” The tyger touched his cap, the jockey bowed, and away they dashed without another word.

  “Neddie,” Lizzy murmured in his ear, “I cannot like Fanny's situation. Miss Sharpe, too, is most indisposed.”

  “I shall send you back to Godmersham with Pratt.”

  “Not until the constabulary arrives,” Lizzy replied firmly. “I will not quit the scene until I know how things stand with Mr. Collingforth. I am in part responsible for his discomfiture, but I thought it necessary to speak.”

  “Undoubtedly. You did well. Jane!”

  “Yes, Neddie?” I joined them in a moment.

  “I should dearly love another pair of eyes. If you and Lizzy would return to the coach, and from that vantage survey the crowd for anything untoward — the slightest detail that might seem amiss — it should be as gold.”

  “With alacrity,” I said, and slipped my hand through Lizzy's arm.

  “And now, Mr. Collingforth,” Neddie said, as we turned away, “I must ask leave to search your chaise. Stand aside, Mr. Everett!”

  “WHAT A CURIOUS LIGHT THIS SHEDS UPON ONE'S neighbours, to be sure.” Lizzy sighed, as her green eyes roved intendy over the equipages drawn up helter-skelter near our own. “There is Mr. Hayes, bustling all his party into a closed carriage, and intent upon his return to Ashford. He will not stay a moment, even in respect of the dead — the chance at seizing a clear road before his fellows is too tempting to be missed. Lady Elizabeth Finch-Hatton is pretending to an indisposition. See her there, with her kerchief over her face? I suppose I brought on a fit, by descending from my barouche and approaching the corpse. What a comfort that we need not be so nice, when Lady Elizabeth is on display!”

  “I admired your activity, Mrs. Austen,” Miss Sharpe said suddenly. “I wished that I might imitate it. That dreadful man required an answer!”

  “You observed the lady to enter his chaise as well?”

  “Yes,” the governess replied, her eyes averted, “but I did not remark her leaving it. I cannot recollect the slightest instance of her passing, in fact, until the moment that litde Fanny espied her at the rail — mounted on the black horse, and at the very moment of joining the fray. I shall not soon forget that.”